Garage looks really nice: I've evaluated it with test code and benchmarks and it looks like a winner. Also, very straightforward deployment (self contained executable) and good docs.

But no tags on objects is a pretty big gap, and I had to shelve it. If Garage folk see this: please think on this. You obviously have the talent to make a killer application, but tags are table stakes in the "cloud" API world.

I really, really appreciate that Garage accommodates running as a single node without work-arounds and special configuration to yield some kind of degraded state. Despite the single minded focus on distributed operation you no doubt hear endlessly (as seen among some comments here,) there are, in fact, traditional use cases where someone will be attracted to Garage only for the API compatibility, and where they will achieve availability in production sufficient to their needs by means other than clustering.

Arbitrary name+value pairs attached to S3 objects and buckets, and readily available via the S3 API. Metadata, basically. AWS has some tie-ins with permissions and other features, but tags can be used for any purpose. You might encode video multiple times at different bitrates, and store the rate in a tag on each object, for example. Tags are an affordance used by many applications for countless purposes.

I heard that it was perhaps recently fixed, but copying many small files was multiple times faster to do via something like Total Commander vs the built in File Explorer (large files goes equally fast).

People seeing how slow Explorer was to copy would probably presume that it was a lower level Windows issue if they had a predisposed bias against Microsoft/Windows.

My theory about Explorers sluggishness is that they added visual feedback to the copying process at some point, and for whatever reason that visual feedback is synchronous/slow (perhaps capped at the framerate, thus 60 files a second), whilst TC does updating in the background and just renderers status periodically whilst the copying thread(s) can run at full speed of what the OS is capable of under the hood.

I could see that or other safety checks making one program slower than another that doesn’t bother. Or that sort of thing being an opportunity for a poor implementation that slows everything down a bunch.

[1] Finder has parts that show continued use of code written for MacOS 9 :V

A big, increasing over last decade, chunk of that is fear that they will break the compatibility - or otherwise drop in shared knowledge. To the point that the more critical parts the less anyone wants to touch them (heard that ntfs.sys is essentially untouchable these days, for example).

And various rules that used to be sacrosanct are no longer followed, like the "main" branch of Windows source repository having to always build cleanly every night (fun thing - Microsoft is one of the origins of nightly builds as a practice)

Less people are trusted to touch ntfs.sys due to lack of experience, thus they never gain it and that in turn means less work and in turn means even less people have proved themselves trustworthy enough to work on it.

Until nobody remains in the company that is trusted enough.

Microsoft gives them a lot of ammo. While, as I said, Microsoft et al. have seen that SMB is indeed efficient, at the same time security has been neglected to the point of being farcical. You can see this in headlines as recent as last week: Microsoft is only now, in 2025, deprecating RC4 authentication, and this includes SMB.

So while one might leverage SMB for high throughput file service, it has always been the case that you can't take any exposure for granted: if it's not locked down by network policies and you don't regularly ensure all the knobs and switches are tweaked just so, it's an open wound, vulnerable to anything that can touch an endpoint or sniff a packet.

MS would bend backwards to make sure those enterprise Windows 0.24 boxes will still be able to connect to networks because those run some 16bit drivers for CNC machines.

Meanwhile Google decided to kill a product the second whoever introduced it on stage walked off it.

Azure is a money-maked for MS, and wouldn't be so without those weird legacy enterprise deployments. The big question is if continuing to increase a posture about about security together with an "cloud" focus is actually in their best interest or if retaining those legacy enterprises would have been smarter.

Can't say what other TVs do, but this one works fine without TOS etc. If there is some feature or other that doesn't work due to this, I can say I've never missed it.

Are there novel tasks? Inside the limits of physics, tasks are finite, and most of them are pointless. One can certainly entertain tasks that transcend physics, but that isn't necessary if one merely wants an immortal and indomitable electronic god.

Perl was effectively "dead" before Perl 6 existed. I was there. I bought the books, wrote the code, hung out in #perl and followed the progress. I remember when Perl 6 was announced. I remember barely caring by that time, and I perceived that I was hardly alone. Everyone had moved on by then. At best, Perl 6 was seen as maybe Perl making a "come back."

Java, and (by extension) Windows, killed Perl.

Java promised portability. Java had a workable cross-platform GUI story (Swing). Java had a web story with JSP, Tomcat, Java applets, etc. Java had a plausible embedded and mobile story. Java wasn't wedded to the UNIX model, and at the time, Java's Windows implementation was as least as good as its non-Windows implementations, if not better. Java also had a development budget, a marketing budget, and the explicit blessing of several big tech giants of the time.

In the late 90's and early 2000's, Java just sucked the life out of almost everything else that wasn't a "systems" or legacy big-iron language. Perl was just another casualty of Java. Many of the things that mattered back then either seem silly today or have been solved with things other than Java, but at the time they were very compelling.

Could Perl have been saved? Maybe. The claims that Perl is difficult to learn or "write only" aren't true: Perl isn't the least bit difficult. Nearly every Perl programmer on Earth is self-taught, the documentation is excellent and Google has been able to answer any basic Perl question one might have for decades now. If Perl had somehow bent itself enough to make Windows a first-class platform, it would have helped a lot. If Perl had provided a low friction, batteries-included de facto standard web template and server integration solution, it would have helped a lot as well. If Perl had a serious cross-platform GUI story, that would helped a lot.

To the extent that the Perl "community" was somehow incapable of these things, we can call the death of Perl a phenomena of "culture." I, however, attribute the fall of Perl to the more mundane reason that Perl had no business model and no business advocates.

When I joined in 2002, there were only a couple of developers in general, and no one sponsored to work on or evangelize any specific technology full time. Sometimes I wonder if Sun had more paid people working on Tcl.

I don't mean to malign or sideline the work anyone at ORA or ActiveState did in those days. Certainly the latter did more work to make Perl a first-class language on Windows than anyone. Yet that's very different from a funded Python Software Foundation or Sun supporting Java or the entire web browser industry funding JavaScript or....

So, I guess the counterfactual line of enquiry ought to be why Perl didn't, or couldn't, or didn't want, to pivot towards stronger commercial backing, sooner.

Since k8s is very effective at running a bunch of containers across a few machines, it would appear to be exactly the correct thing to reach for. At this point, running a small k8s operation, with k3s or similar, has become so easy that I can't find a rational reason to look elsewhere for container "orchestration".

It was as much personal "taste" than anything, and I would describe the choice as similar to preferring JSON over XML.

For whatever reason, kubernetes just irritates me. I find it unpleasant to use. And I don't think I'm unique in that regard.

I feel the same. I feel like it's a me problem. I was able to build and run massive systems at scale and never used kubernetes. Then, all of a sudden, around 2020, any time I wanted to build or run or do anything at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes. And then when I wanted to do anything with docker in production, not even at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes.

Then there was a brief period around 2021 where everyone - even kubernetes fans - realised it was being used everywhere, even when it didn't need to be. "You don't need k8s" became a meme.

And now, here we are, again, lots of people saying "just use k8s for everything".

I've learned it enough to know how to use it and what I can do with it. I still prefer to use literally anything else apart from k8s when building, and the only time I've ever felt k8s has been really needed to solve a problem is when the business has said "we're using k8s, deal with it".

It's like the Javascript or WordPress of the infrastructure engineering world - it became the lazy answer, IMO. Or the me problem angle: I'm just an aged engineer moaning at having to learn new solutions to old problems.

I also re-investigated containerization - weighing Docker Swarm vs K3s - and settled on Docker Swarm.

I’ve hated it ever since. Swarm is a PITA to use and has all kinds of failure modes that are different than regular old Docker Compose.

I’ve considered migrating again - either to Kubernetes, or just back to plain Docker - but haven’t done it. Maybe I should look at Uncloud?

With k8s you write a bunch of manifests that are 70% repetitive boilerplate. But actually, there is something you need that cannot be achieved with pure manifest, so you reach for Kustomize. But Kustomize actually doesn't do what you want, so you need to convert the entire thing to Helm.

You also still need to spin up your k8s cluster, which itself consists of half a dozen pods just so you have something where you can run your service. Oh, you wanted your service to be accessible from outside the cluster? Well, you need to install an ingress controller in your cluster. Oh BTW, the nginx ingress controller is now deprecated, so you have to choose from a handful of alternatives, all of which have certain advantages and disadvantages, and none of which are ideal for all situations. Have fun choosing.

That’s not bad, but I want to spend more time trying new things or enjoying the results of my efforts than maintaining the underlying substrates. For that purpose, K8s is consistently too complicated for my own ends - and Uncloud looks to do exactly what I want.

And if you want to use more than one machine then you run `docker swarm init`, and you can keep using the Compose file you already have, almost unchanged.

It's not a K8s replacement, but I'm guessing for some people it would be enough and less effort than a full migration to Kubernetes (e.g. hobby projects).

If you have a service with a simple compose file, you can have a simple k8s manifest to do the same thing. Plenty of tools convert right between the two (incl kompose, which k8s literally hands you: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/tra...)

Frankly, you're messing up by including kustomize or helm at all in 80% of cases. Just write the (agreed on tedious boilerplate - the manifest format is not my cup of tea) yaml and be done with the problem.

And no - you don't need an ingress. Just spin up a nodeport service, and you have the literal identical experience to exposing ports with compose - it's just a port on the machines running the cluster (any of them - magic!).

You don't need to touch an ingress until you actually want external traffic using a specific hostname (and optionally tls), which is... the same as compose. And frankly - at that point you probably SHOULD be thinking about the actual tooling you're using to expose that, in the same way you would if you ran it manually in compose. And sure - arguably you could move to gateways now, but in no way is the ingress api deprecated. They very clearly state...

> "The Ingress API is generally available, and is subject to the stability guarantees for generally available APIs. The Kubernetes project has no plans to remove Ingress from Kubernetes."

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr...

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Plenty of valid complaints for K8s (yaml config boilerplate being a solid pick) but most of the rest of your comment is basically just FUD. The complexity scale for K8s CAN get a lot higher than docker. Some organizations convince themselves it should and make it very complex (debatably for sane reasons). For personal needs... Just run k3s (or minikube, or microk8s, or k3ds, or etc...) and write some yaml. It's at exactly the same complexity as docker compose, with a slightly more verbose syntax.

Honestly, it's not even as complex as configuring VMs in vsphere or citrix.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/serv...

Might need to redefine the port range from 30000-32767. Actually, if you want to avoid the ingress abstraction and maybe want to run a regular web server container of your choice to act as it (maybe you just prefer a config file, maybe that's what your legacy software is built around, maybe you need/prefer Apache2, go figure), you'd probably want to be able to run it on 80 and 443. Or 3000 or 8080 for some other software, out of convenience and simplicity.

Depending on what kind of K8s distro you use, thankfully not insanely hard to change though: https://docs.k3s.io/cli/server#networking But again, that's kind of going against the grain.

As for grabbing 443 or 80, most distros support specifying the port in the service spec directly, and I don't think it needs to be in the range of the reserved nodeports (I've done this on k3s, worked fine last I checked, which is admittedly a few years ago now).

As you grow to more than a small number of exposed services, I think an ingress generally does make sense, just because you want to be able to give things persistent names. But you can run a LONG way on just nodeports.

And even after going with an ingress - the tooling here is pretty straight forward. MetalLB (load balancer) and nginx (ingress, reverse proxy) don't take a ton of time or configuration.

As someone who was around when something like a LAMP stack wasn't "legacy", I think it's genuinely less complicated to setup than those old configurations. Especially because once you get it right in the yaml once, recreating it is very, very easy.

The network is complicated by the overlay network, so "normal" troubleshooting tools aren't super helpful. Storage is complicated by k8s wanting to fling pods around so you need networked storage (or to pin the pods, which removes almost all of k8s' value). Databases are annoying on k8s without networked storage, so you usually run them outside the cluster and now you have to manage bare metal and k8s resources.

The manifests are largely fine, outside of some of the more abnormal resources like setting up the nginx ingress with certs.

Especially in-house on bare metal.

You would not be able to operate hundreds or thousand of any nodes without operation complexlity and k8s helps you here a lot.

I have struggled to get things like this stood up and hit many footguns along the way

The clear target of this project is a k8s-like experience for people who are already familiar with Docker and docker compose but don't want to spend the energy to learn a whole new thing for low stakes deployments.

A normal person wouldn't think 'hey lets use k8s for the low stakes deployment over here'.

I'm afraid I have to disappoint you

K3s is just a repackaged, simplified k8s distro. You get the same behavior and the same tools as you have any time you operate an on-premises k8s cluster, and these, in my experience, are somewhere between good and excellent. So I can't imagine what you have in mind here.

"It's still essentially adding few hundred thousand lines of code into your infrastructure"

Sure. And they're all there for a reason: it's what one needs to orchestrate containers via an API, as revealed by a vast horde of users and years of refinement.

...the fact it's still k8s which is a mountain of complexity compared to near anything else out there ?

It seems that way but in reality "resource" is a generic concept in k8s. K8s is a management/collaboration platform for "resources" and everything is a resource. You can define your own resource types too. And who knows, maybe in the future these won't be containers or even linux processes? Well it would still work given this model.

But now, what if you really just want to run a bunch of containers across a few machines?

My point is, it's overcomplicated and abstracts too heavily. Too smart even... I don't want my co workers to define our own resource types, we're not at a google scale company.

This is unique in my personal experience. I've haven't seen this in other cats.

Thanks for pointing that out.